J. Ashley Panter

J. Ashley Panter

20 Social Media Features You Didn’t Know Existed

Social media networks are continuously adding cool little features here and there, and it can be tough to keep up — especially if there’s no big announcement.

For instance, did you know you can reorder the sections on your Facebook business Page? That you can embed a SlideShare presentation directly into a tweet? That you can add hidden relationship notes to your LinkedIn connections? (That one’s my favorite.)

There are so many cool things our favorite social networks can do that may have fallen through the cracks. To help you discover these hidden treasures, we rounded up 20 of the lesser-known features on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Check ’em out.

20 Little-Known Things You Can Do On …

Facebook

1) Save links for later.

Ever seen articles in your News Feed you wished you could bookmark for later? Well, you can. Facebook recently added a feature that allows users to save links to articles, events, TV shows, music, and more to read later. All you have to do is click that little downward arrow on the top right-hand corner of the article in your Feed, then choose the “Save” option.

2) Replace ads with baby animals.

Nothing puts a smile on my face like sleeping puppies in my peripheral. If you love baby animals and hate banner ads, then you and BabyAnimalBlocker might be a match made in heaven. The free Chrome Extension turns display ads into images of pets on every website you visit, including Facebook. (Learn more about it here.)

3) Find targeted conversations.

The search bar at the top of your Facebook Page isn’t just for searching for names. (Or Pages, groups, events, and apps.) Now, you can type in a few keywords to search for old News Feed posts, both on desktop and mobile. (Learn more about the Facebook Graph Search update here.)

4) Poll people in a group or event.

Although Facebook removed the polling feature from business Pages’ status updates, you can still poll users in groups and events. Choose the “Ask a Question” tab inside the status update bar. Click “Add Poll Options” to enter multiple-choice options. Use this to ask your audience for feedback about event location or execution, content you’ve posted, and so on.

5) Edit photos directly in the Facebook mobile app.

If you’re looking for a quick photo fix on mobile, you can edit photos to some degree right in the Facebook app. Enhance the photo, apply a filter, or crop/rotate the photo.

How? Once you’ve uploaded a photo, simply give the photo a single tap to bring up these options on the bottom of your screen.

6) Reorder the sections on your business Page.

Want the “Photos” section to be above “About” on your business Page? No problem — just hover your mouse over the section head of any one of your sections until a small pencil appears. Click the pencil and choose “Manage Sections.”

From there, you can drag to reorder.

Twitter

7) Embed SlideShare presentations directly into your tweets.

When you embed a SlideShare presentation directly into a tweet, your followers can flip through the presentation without ever having to leave Twitter (or the page a tweet is embedded on). Here, try flipping through this one from SlideShare Today:

To embed a SlideShare presentation into a tweet, all you have to do is link to the presentation and it will embed automatically. This is also true for documents and videos from SlideShare as well.

8) Find out who’s unfollowed you.

Using unfollowers.com, you can actually find out who’s unfollowed your Twitter account. This is especially useful for brands that are building their Twitter presence and experimenting with different approaches like voice, posting time, and so on. If you find a lot of important and relevant people are unfollowing you (such as influencers in your industry), then you know you need to change something in your Twitter strategy.

9) Pin your GIFs on Twitter so they autoplay.

If you post a GIF on Twitter by adding it as you would a photo, it doesn’t autoplay in your followers’ Twitter feeds. But it does autoplay if you pin it to the top of your own Twitter feed. Go ahead and try it on yours!

To pin a tweet, you’ll first need to tweet out the tweet you want to pin. Then, click the ellipsis at the bottom of the tweet and choose “Pin Tweet.” It’ll show up at the top of your feed on your personal Twitter account until you unpin it (which you do by clicking the ellipsis again and choosing “Unpin Tweet”).

10) Analyze your tweets for free.

Almost everyone with a Twitter account now has free access to data about their timeline activity and followers with Twitter Analytics. The dashboard gives you data on impressions, engagement, link clicks, retweets, favorites, and replies. You can even export this data into an Excel file. (Learn more about Twitter Analytics here.)

11) Research and analyze a hashtag.

Using Topsy.com, you can research different hashtags and see whether users are using it, how often it’s being used over certain periods of time, and more. Robyn Showers, our social media manager here at HubSpot, uses it when she’s choosing a hashtag for an upcoming event. For example, she was once choosing between #watchitwednesday and #webinarwednesday. Topsy.com told her #watchitwednesday has historically been used by sports brands and the hip hop community — a very difference audience than HubSpot’s. So she went with #webinarwednesday, which hadn’t been used in years and historically had a more business-oriented audience.

12) Tag people in Twitter photos.

Just like on Facebook, you can tag your photos on Twitter — and it doesn’t count against your 140 characters. Once you’ve uploaded a photo to your tweet, click “Who’s in this photo?” and tag up to 10 people.

13) Create a Twitter photo collage.

Choosing between two, three, or even four photos to tweet? Turns out you don’t really have to — you can include up to four individual photos in one tweet that automatically create a collage. Here’s an example from BuzzFeed:

14) See all the tweets you’ve “favorited.”

On your own Twitter page, you can see all the tweets you’ve ever “favorited.” (Everyone else can see these tweets, too.) You can use this as a bookmarking tool, or as a place to look back on tweets you liked on a rainy day.

LinkedIn

15) Add hidden relationship notes.

Like I said, this is my favorite little-known feature of LinkedIn. You can add relationship notes, reminders, and a note on how you met (and who introduced you) for any one of your connections. To get to this feature, click “Relationship” right under the person’s profile picture. No one else can access the information you put in there.

16) Embed media files on your profile.

Break up your text-heavy profile and showcase your work by adding media like images, documents, links, SlideShares, videos, and audio to different sections on your profile. To add these media files, click “Edit Profile” and look for the media icon when you hover your mouse over each section.

17) Save a job search (or ten).

Searching for a job on LinkedIn usually takes more than one login session. Once you’ve performed a search, you can save the search by clicking the “Save Search” link in the top right-hand corner of the page. You can save up to 10 job searches at a time.

18) Create a Showcase Page.

Showcase Pages are niche pages branched off of a main company page that allow that company to promote specific products or market to a specific buyer persona. Microsoft, for example, has showcase pages for Office, Dynamics, Lync, and other products:

If your goal is to keep LinkedIn content relevant, personal, and interesting for specific buyer personas, Showcase Pages could be a great addition to your social media strategy. (If you want to learn more, here’s a beginner’s guide to Showcase Pages.)

Pinterest

19) Use trackable links that aren’t marked as spam.

Pinterest tends to block shortened links, so if you’ve been adding tracking cookies to links and shortening them, then your pins are probably not linking anywhere. The good news is you don’t actually need to shorten your trackable links on Pinterest. Unlike social networks like Twitter, the link itself isn’t visible to users — it’s the pins themselves that are linked. So all you need to do is create that long trackable link, and you’re done. (Learn how here.)